Who's an African?: Tools for Exploitation and Fake Liberation

The first kid says:

"I'm waiting for my last day in school, the children in Africa still for their first one."

second kid:

"in africa, many kids would be glad to worry about school"

third kid:

"in africa, kids don't come to school late, but not at all" (!)

fourth kid:

"some teachers suck. no teachers sucks even more."















This is precisely why educators must adopt a radical stance toward teaching race, ethnicity, and racial politics in our schools. The fact that an organization like UNICEF can honestly say that this type of advertisement shows "solidarity" with African children is not only erroneous but painfully symptomatic of our "race doesn't matter anymore" culture. Social responsibility, of course, starts with every individual. However, we must question what type of global culture we are in when cultural erasure happens to include the erasure of our collective memory of centuries of negative imagery and stereotypes. How convenient that the very imagery that has been used to oppress african people and other oppressed people is now being sold as tools for their liberation. I guess co-opting has taken on newer more insidious forms.

Perhaps what is most troubling is that this is the second blackface advertisement I have seen over the course of the last two days. American Apparel is currently running an ad of a woman (who's ethnicity is being debated) in black face with the caption "Sweeter than Candy, Better than Cake".

See it for yourself here:

http://www.racialicious.com/2007/08/17/american-apparel-trumpets-blackface-fashion-spread-in-i-d-magazine/

This summer I even had the displeasure of visiting the Jersey Shore and seeing two white teens walking down the boardwalk in makeup that immediately conjured up blackface for me.(their skin looked like they were wearing shoe polish on their faces) As a black woman I wonder when we handed out these permission slips, or if they are simply indicative of the fact that racial hegemony is alive, well, and in practice in ways both obvious and innocuous. Also peep this ad with Gwyneth Paltrow:

http://www.libertyfilmfestival.com/libertas/?p=2246.

Apparently the only people who can "save" Africans look nothing like them. Just know that in my classroom in Atlanta, GA these issues are being tackled, grappled with, and presented to a group of racially, culturally, socio-economically diverse girls who will leave that classroom with enough sense to say ENOUGH. And as Sweet Honey in the Rock sings "We will not bow down to your racism, we will not bow down to injustice...."

Peace....Go out and educate the hell out of somebody!

Yaisha

P.S. Images like this are exactly why Dave Chappelle quit his show. The more we let them laugh the more they think they have "permission" to use those images.

STOP HATIN! : Reasons to Love Robin Thicke

In the same way that Lil’ Kim’s supporters donned t-shirts that told all y’all haters to “Stop Snitchin”, I’m gonna have to stick up for my “white boy du jour” Robin Thicke and say: “Stop Hatin”. I know that my blog is inordinately populated with posts about “blue-eyed soul” and issues of appropriation so it may seem strange that I would choose to defend Thicke. But that is his appeal.

My man already knows that he’s workin from behind. On “Would That Make You Love Me” he sings: “Would u be my lover, if I were a different color?”
Yes, Robin perhaps. I was a little ticked and tickled to read reviews of the “Evolution of Robin Thicke” album that likened him, his sound, and this album to everybody else’s white boy du jour, Justin Timberlake. What a gross comparison. Where Timberlake clearly shows up to the studio to sing whatever Tim, Pharell, and the crew have thought up for him, Thicke spent some time alone writing, fucking up the vocals, and trying to communicate how much he “needs love”. These are two different artists, with that word probably being what separates them.

I put Robin Thicke in the same drawer as my other lover Lewis Taylor. If I’m gon love you, you gon have to work for it. Artists like Lewis and Robin are putting in work, at least attempting to craft personal, meaningful albums, that while they may be heavy on the croonin have substance. Let’s do a questionairre right quick to assess the state of R&B (what I now think of as Rap and Bullshit, but that’s another post altogether):

1. When is the last time an R&B artist put out a bonafied, real deal draws-dropper, baby making joint? I would suggest D’Angelo’s “Voodoo”. Well, that’s the last time I tried to get locked up in the room with a cd for days.

2. What’s wrong with the falsetto y’all? You know it makes you hot…stop frontin. And …you know it makes your girl hot. Again, stop frontin.

3. Can I congratulate Thicke on being in love instead of just in lust? At least when he’s talking about sex, he’s not talking about “beatin the stuffin up”.

This is in no way meant to be a comprehensive review. I know that there are problems with this album and my analysis. But can I suggest this: Can we just shut the fuck up, turn the cd on, and get some lovin? Sometimes you need to…nevermind where you get it from. Besides, this fool said he can “do better than make love to you…” Sign me up.

The Root/I Never Loved a Man: Working Through Nostalgia, Reconciling Identity

The other day I was cooking breakfast/brunch and the TV was on. I was whisking my eggs, and nibbling a bit on the salmon I planned to fold into the omelet I was making. The TV was tuned to something on MTV, the kind of bullshit I like to watch when I’m wasting time. And I heard something about “there are some relationships that you just never get over”, and my mind turned to my own “never get over” relationship. I knew automatically what that relationship was for me, tasted it right on the pointed tip of my top lip, and wished for it as I flipped over my omelet. It’s probably no coincidence that I had begun obsessing over Aretha Franklin earlier in the week as I read a chapter on her in Craig Werner’s “A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America”. Peter Guralnick reports that on the day “I Never Loved a Man…” was released, “People were dancing on the frosty street with themselves or with one another and lining up at the counter to get a purchase on that magic sound as the record kept playing over and over. It was as if the millennium had arrived”. Kinda like being in love right? You don’t notice the cold air or anything natural, you’re just busy, sometimes frantic about, capturing that feeling forever. You want it so bad, you’ll live off putting the joint on repeat or flipping the record back over and over.

I started thinking about the title song of that album, and how I feel that it is at once one of Aretha’s semi-forgotten performances, and one of the truest exhortations to holdin’ on I’ve ever heard. I started listening to it today on repeat, and I felt as though I might as well be singing: “I would leave you if I could/I guess I’m on tight/And I’m stuck like glue/Cause I/ain’t never/I ain’t never/I ain’t never, no, no,/Loved a man the way that I/I love you…” I wondered if she ever got over him, if there was a him in the first place, and I wondered the same thing about myself. How does one get over a “love hangover”?

There are a lot of songs by black artists that paint the pain of movin on with great intensity. Just off the top of my head I’m referencing Diana Ross’ breathy sexy performance on “Love Hangover”, The Ojays’ “I Guess You Got Your Hooks In Me” (this phrase also shows up in ‘I Never Loved A Man’), Lenny Williams’ classic “I Love You”, and Marvin Gaye’s entire “Here, My Dear” album. When I start thinking about how many songs there are about the “relationship you never get over”, I got to seriously thinking about black people, the soul aesthetic, and the watershed moments of the 60’s and 70’s. Perhaps we all complain about the apathy of our youth, the ineffectual actions of black leadership, and even the so-called “un-originality” of today’s black artists because the 60’s and 70’s have “got their hooks in us”.

The history of black people in America started when the first Africans arrived chained on these shores. We had no history that we could hold onto with any real certainty. The brutal cultural erasure process of slavery and colonialism took care of that. And afterward what we did have was our pain, rage, anger, and search for self. In the 60’s and 70’s we found US through music and other art produced during that period. We became revolutionaries, soul kings and queens, the undisputed progenitors of the rhythm of this nation. It was, in fact, our golden age. It was, as Aretha Franklin says in an interview, when we started “falling in love with ourselves…”

That love affair ain’t hardly over. But like all good affairs there comes a time when the original vapors start to settle and it becomes time to build something real. We all want the euphoria of that time. We define ourselves by this experience, it has added an unmistakable narrative of power and magic to the story of black life in the United States. The 60’s, and 70’s is the history we created, not the one we were given or forced into. These decades were about choice and the unabashed expression of freedom, rage, and cultural capital.

But now what? Today, people argue that black folks are in something of a downward spiral. When I think about our lives right now I recall one of our contemporary soul singers (I refuse to ever use the word “neo-soul”, for the record), D’Angelo. His “Voodoo”, a much slept on album, shows D caught up in the throes of some unrequited love shit, some lounging in the house in your underwear thinking about that woman or man that was so right but wrong shit. When folks remember this album it’s probably the image of a naked brown and fine D’Angelo flexing on the “Untitled” video that endures. But Voodoo is about so much more than that. Its about being under, its about realizing the end has arrived but still holding on, “done worked a root that will not be reversed /and then I go on/go on my own way even though it hurts/surrounded by mojo/left my mojo in my favorite suit/she left a stain/left a dirty stain on my heart that I cain’t refute”. I don’t want to refute the 60’s and 70’s, but when will we “go on our own way even though it hurts”? It is hard indeed to walk away from those things that have defined us, made us the people that we are today. I won’t say that our post-70’s generations haven’t created any type of enduring legacy or contributed anything to the advancement of our culture. We need only to look toward hip-hop to understand that fact. But the trouble with that, and perhaps the trouble with any relationship after “the one you’ll never get over”, is that its complicated and forever linked to that defining experience in ways both obvious and innocuous.

I thought that I would have an answer by now and I do not. I can’t pretend to have any wisdom on what to do because I haven’t done it. I’m still under myself, still reeling from the root. Parting from my golden age, college and my first love, is proving to be harder than I ever thought. Those were the times when things made sense, when objectives were clear and not muddled with the past that I have now made. I feel like D’angelo again: “Tell me what will I do/Send it on back to you”. The truth is, that the past provides comfort in ways that the future never will. Thinking about new ways to love, new ways of being, or in the case of black folks—new revolutions, is difficult. It involves being truthful about the ways that we have been strengthened and about the ways we have been broken.


“Sometimes we don’t what else to say but hmmmm…”
~ D’Angelo

This is a whole different ballgame and we have to accept it. We live in a different time and how we react to its problems and triumphs have to be different. The American culture we live in right now is controlled by images and their resulting apathy. The art and personhood we create is easily marketed and consumed by a waiting public. This complicates anything we do. It makes creating an organic movement somewhat impossible. I think a great deal, maybe too much, about using our burdens as our song. This is what D’Angelo does on the Voodoo album, and what we have always done. In a Vogue magazine article on visual artist Wangechi Mutu she speaks about her use of images from the magazine to create commentary on the abusive affect these images have on women. When speaking of the paradox she says, “I obsess on it. I hate it, and I love it. I ignore it, and I pay too much attention to it. Placing my work in that context will show how much I distort the raw material that I get…” Wangechi’s artistic dilemma describes the status of our affair. Our current identity is a mixture of nostalgia, re-creation, synthesis, and confusion. The problem with our identity is that we can’t decide, and in many cases are robbed of the autonomy, to determine what it is. For the hip-hop age are we 50 Cent or Common? Are we Crunk or Conscious? Can we venture out of these structures even and become something different, something more hybrid? Inside these questions we end up lost somewhere in the divide.

The past and the present are our raw material. They are what we have right now to move on, to get to our next golden age. If piecing it together is what we must do then so be it. I’ll keep going, crying when I need to, holding up my new pictures to the negatives of my old ones and comparing. But I no longer want to be hung over. I don’t want to be sick. I’ll send it on back to you, and when I get it back I’m gonna remix it, but then again that’s what I’ve been doing all along.

My Soul Says … ? : America's Divided Definitions of Soul

(originally written on May 23, 2006)

I must start this day off with a rant my friends. And I think you already know what this rant is about. I got home last night and went to bed rather late. I woke up on time but my attempts to catch the bus were foiled by a bad case of the runs. So, I was home when morning TV was on. Yes, I saw, briefly, Taylor Hicks singing "Living for the City". I was undone. Flabbergasted.
How can you sing "Living for The City" with a smile on your face? And in that same vein (as Z and I have discussed before) "Try A Little Tenderness" is not meant to be danced around on. I think that the interpretation of "soul" by white America actually translates into something more akin to : jovial, sexy (although Taylor scarcely manages this), vibrato, and any type of feigned rhythm. For them soul is not rage, emptiness, joy, pain, grace the way it is for us. When I listen to "Living for the City" I break down and cry....I DO NOT dance around in a purple suit. And maybe that's because I really am living for the city, trying to survive with what I got, makin it through on faith and hope. Taylor, you cannot communicate this. For you soul now amounts to anything that manages to be entertaining, while I know that my rage (while intriguing to you) certainly is not. How does a purple suit find itself anywhere near these lyrics:

Her brother’s smart he’s got more sense than many
His patience’s long but soon he won’t have any
To find a job is like a haystack needle
Cause where he lives they don’t use colored people
Living just enough, just enough for the city

Living just enough
For the city oh, oh

His hair is long, his feet are hard and gritty
He spends his life walking the streets of new york city
He’s almost dead from breathing in air pollution
He tried to vote but to him there’s no solution
Living just enough, just enough for the city

In Stevie's version, the chords are moody and futuristic, the organ is psychadelic, his voice somewhere between hope, disillusionment, rage, and death. I have thought on many occasions (often while riding home on the bus) that this song is a sonic masterpiece. Taylor's rendition was, to put it simply, white man in "black" face. And lets just remember that I didnt need to see the whole performance to diagnose that. All i needed was the glare of the purple suit and i was done.

I also felt that this performance and others like it are misinterpretations of the work of Stevie Wonder. It seems that in our post-70's, what my baby daddy Mark Anthony Neal often refers to as "post-soul" memory Stevie Wonder emerges as part genius, part entertainment maelstrom. Now, in his older age he is an artist that we trot out for showcases, nostalgia, inspiration and honor without giving much thought to the context and real content of his music.

More than making us dance or making us love Stevie created music that made us think. Perhaps the joy and grace that Stevie has always put into his music made it easy for us to ignore the pain, the anger, and calls for revolution. When you think Stevie you may automatically think of the pop magic of: "AS", "I Just Called To Say I Love You", "Always", or some of his early Motown recordings. But now as Stevie ages, and I age too, I'm thinking about him in light of the scathing criticism of "You Haven't Done Nothin", the storytelling on "Pasttime Paradise", the melancholy movement of "Superwoman" and the blues commentary of "Livin For The City". And maybe what I'm really learning about is passing the party and gettin down to the nitty gritty of the music that makes an artist relevant.

Soul is about more than how well you perform, how you dance, or get people to move. Sometimes its about actually "moving" people. When Otis sang "Young girls they may be weary..." he meant that shit. Cause young black girls really are weary, and I'm one of them. Sick and tired of this fake love, constantly misbehavin, and shamin love we get from white people. Leave me alone if you can't figure out what I mean in my entirety.

I am actually amused by Taylor thinking he is on the Soul Patrol. I watched the show last week and I died laughing when he sang "Try a Little Tenderness" and hugged himself like he was a damn Care Bear. That was great TV. I even told Z that at many homes across middle America wives were not washing the dishes that night b/c of Taylor (y'all know its true). So while Taylor is great TV, I cannot sit idly by while he crosses the line into that "place where no soul-less person shall enter". That place is in our blues, our gray area, the nuances of soul and how it is conveyed. It is there that I recognize black folks and soul music in their entirety. And that place is sacred. Amen.

The Madness in the Music: Getting a Clue About Michael Jackson

MJ: "Livin Off the Wall..." 

I was lying in bed surfing the net and I came across this Mark Anthony Neal joint titled: "White Chocolate", http://www.popmatters.com/columns/criticalnoire/021217.shtml
where he elaborates on his theories about white folks who sing "black music". I have been grappling with this issue of appropriation, for lack of a better word, and while I agree with what he had to say about white people’s relationship to soul music I have to take issue with this one sentence from his piece: "More a glam-rock track, "Lover Girl" catapulted [Teena] Marie to the top-ten pop charts in an era that was dominated by blah, blah over-the-top pop acts like MJ, Lionel Ritchie, Van Halen, Culture Club, and Cyndi Lauper. " Hold up. Did he just call MJ "blah-blah over the top"? Yes, I do think that Michael Jackson has lost his damn mind and that he really started to lose it after lets say the "Bad" album. I think that MJ started all the pop antics b/c the world needed him to and because he realized that he could, or maybe one of his agents realized he could, but that is beside the point. The real point is: What do we do with Michael Jackson? I’ve been thinking about this a lot in light of his sexual molestation trial. Even when faced with his criminal actions MJ fans, including myself, still reserve some space for him—a place where we pity him, a place where we remember him, and a place where we can still love him.

Friday night I was at the club feeling a little ready to go home, a little tired of the whole scene. There were several annoying things going on (in short: drunk white girls, too much cigarette smoke, and a lady with a really bad afro wig.) but all of that ended when I heard MJ sing:

“Cause we’re the party people night and day/ livin crazy that’s the only way/so tonight we gonna leave the 9 to 5 up on the shelf and just enjoy ourselves/ move/ let the madness in the music get to you/ life ain’t so bad at all/when you’re livin off the wall…”

Even the DJ felt the need to give him a shout-out as he instructed the crowd to “Party for Michael y’all!” I was movin and groovin fo sho at that point, and when I made what my friends call my signature “party-turn” on the dance floor I thought real hard about the public’s embattled relationship with MJ. Because, at that moment Michael Jackson was not a man on trial, he was not fodder for our fascination with the bizarre, nor was he a scared little black boy still looking for his identity. He was just a dude singing a really good song.

I think that there are two, or more, Michael Jacksons. There is the Michael that Black people and lovers of good dance music adore. This is the Michael that sang “ABC” and stole my mother’s and America’s heart—the same Michael that turned the Ed Sullivan Show all the way out dancin and singin with that huge afro. That’s our Michael. And then there are the great songs he made during the late 70’s and early 80’s. Try all the jams from the “Off the Wall” and “Thriller” albums that still cause people to stop what they’re doing and hit the dance floor. (Have you ever really listened to “Lady in my Life” brotha was sangin for real.) And then even still there’s the Michael of “Michael Mania” that caused little girls and grown men to faint, have asthma attacks, and get arrested from here to Stockholm, Germany. Make no mistake, Michael Jackson ruled the 1980’s. His persona created the likes of Britney and Justin, and changed how far we thought stardom could go.

Perhaps this point in his career, his pop deification, is where the disconnects become clear. I know that Mark Anthony Neal wasn’t referring to MJ circa his Jackson 5 or Motown days. He was talking about when the man became a phenomenon, the largest celebrity commodity in the world. It was also during this time that we began to see evidence of his weird behavior, his crazy metamorphosis into a race-less and sexually confused/ing being. Where did he go wrong?

I couldn’t imagine being Michael Jackson. We, the public, compartmentalize him because we have to. It would be impossible to reconcile our love for him alongside all the strange things he has done and continues to do. He also has the misfortune of being a part of not one, but two generations’ pop iconography. Think of it this way—he’s been a star for more than 20 years. Yes, in so many ways there are more than one MJ. Celebrity is a culprit, his undeniable talent, real life, and pop music itself are all partly responsible for the cracks that are so visible now. He does it to himself because in all this time that we used him as our escape, he was desperately trying to escape too. “let the madness in the music get to you…”, right?

I can’t even get into the pathology that may have caused him to molest children. That’s extremely heady subject matter, even for me. But what I do know is that we may be witnessing the consequences of celebrity, the erosion of genius, and the end of an era. And, that’s off the wall indeed.

Keepin' the Beat: Who Owns Soul Music?

During the past year I’ve heard a lot about this little supposedly singin white girl, Joss Stone. She has this cover of The Isley’s “For the Love Of You”, and keeping in mind my previous post (peep my other blog www.bluetide.blogspot.com) on my crusade to end white girl soul music appropriation you can imagine that it was hard for me to listen to Ms. Stone’s performance with an unbiased ear. This is one of those times when I have to acknowledge my own racial hang-ups. I confess: I didn’t want Joss Stone to be any good. I confess: It does bother me when I think about how much has been, and continues to be co-opted from black people, and that here it is again, one of them trying to do us better than we do.

In a chapter entitled, “Bluebelles, Bell Bottoms, and the Funky Ass White Girl” in Mark Anthony Neal’s book “Songs in the Key of Black Life” he writes: “ ‘Blue-eyed’ soul shares an affinity with what Paul C. Taylor calls the ‘Elvis Effect’, where white participation in traditionally black avenues of cultural production produces feelings of unease.” The feeling of unease stems from a feeling of ownership of black musical forms by black people. If white people think, know, and act like they own commerce then black people surely know that we own music, and in that same vein, dance and the exhibition of rhythm. From this sense of ownership comes the shock and awe that white people may be, to borrow from my brother Eddie Cain Jr., tryin to take our style even tryin ta riff like us. Of course though, this phenomenon is nothing new. There have been a ton of white artists who made it by singing black musical forms either in an “authentic” sense (Namecheck Teena Marie and Lewis Taylor, two white folks who I know can bring a house down) or an “inauthentic” sense (should I even bother to name Elvis, and his modern day progeny Eminem, Brittney, and Justin?). The line between “authentic” and “inauthentic” is thin and when interpreted by black people can only be determined by the quality of the performance, and perhaps more importantly which black people co-sign on it.

Neal says that the presence of the funky ass white person who can, in terms of black cultural standards, sing “simply complicates—but doesn’t repudiate—claims that there is a such thing as ‘black singing’”. I must simply concur. The first time I heard Lewis Taylor sing “Damn, I’m in love with you, I don’t know where my mind has gone, don’t know right from wrong, I didn’t really want to be here but damn I’m in love with you”, I felt the same way about him. Until that moment, no space had existed for Lewis in my musical lexicon. Him singing those songs the way that he did was a space I had reserved in my mind for black men, for black people. It is indeed complicated, mostly because giving credit where its due, in this case, inadvertently means relinquishing some part of our treasured ownership. When you allow black music to equal black culture, which then equals black identity you find the rub. Black singing has become somewhat synonymous with our identity, and if you need evidence of that just check yourself the next time a white co-worker or friend remarks that you just “naturally” sing or dance so well. You get mad about it every time, but on some level you think its true, and even more than that you hold on smugly to the fact that your “natural” ability is something that white people don’t have. (Not that they don’t find ways to control it, but that’s a whole notha otha.)

The idea of “authentic” and “inauthentic” soul is, of course, a matter of interpretation but it is also an attempt on the part of black folks to safeguard the gates to soul. We want to decide who gets to join our ranks. However, the pop music machine has always found a way around that and singers who have gotten no such pardon walk off into the sunset wearing titles like “The King of Rock and Roll”, or “The Next Aretha Franklin” (this is what critics have been saying about Joss Stone).

But do we own it? I have to ask myself that in light of the Lewis Taylors and Teena Maries of the world. And, is my perception of the level to which we, I, possess this music real? Maybe things, art forms including hip-hop, cease to be “ours” once they become cross-over sensations. Is Marvin Gaye singing “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” the sole intellectual property of him, Motown, soul music, and black people or does it belong in some other category once it shows up on a California raisins commercial? The truth is that its hard to own anything, art or otherwise, in a system that favors cultural erasure and where anything can be bought or sold.
Now that I’m in the nitty-gritty of it I can see that this realization may be where my anger lies. Maybe I’m not really mad that Joss Stone turned up on my radio trying her damndest to sing The Isley Brothers. I’m mad because she can. I’m mad that there’s nothing to stop her, I’m mad that my ownership may be an illusion.

Coming Soon...

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